ETL 45: Jay Harrington on Thought Leadership in the Legal Industry

Transcript: Jay Harrington and Bob Buday

Edited for clarity

Bob Buday: Jay, great to have you on my show. I was on your show two years ago, and I really enjoyed the discussion about thought leadership for B2B firms. You’ve shown that somebody can thrive in thought leadership marketing, PR, and concept development for law firms. I congratulate you there.

Jay Harrington: Thanks, Bob. The legal industry has been sort of a follower of the other professional services firms, particularly management consulting, in terms of adapting to new techniques, new approaches, new ways of marketing and growing their businesses. I was sort of on the early edge of it, but the market’s caught up, and now I feel like thought leadership is such a big topic in the legal industry. 

Bob: Looking back, do you think it helped to have been a lawyer, as opposed to not a lawyer, to crack that market? 

Jay: I think so. It could have cut both ways, and I wasn’t exactly sure how it would be received, but I think in general, we’ve had an overwhelming number of opportunities. Sometimes you’ll meet a skeptical lawyer, who thinks like, “Why would I hire you? You’re like me. I don’t know anything about this. Why do you know anything about it?” But I think that most of the legal professionals find it valuable that we know what it’s like to be in their shoes. I know what it’s like to sell legal services, how a certain aspect of marketing fits into the pipeline, and how to deal with attorneys and just generally understand the profession. 

Bob: Earlier in your career, before Harrington Communications, you were at big law firms. When did you recognize that thought leadership marketing and having your firm was a career path you wanted to go down?

Jay: I started my legal career as a practicing lawyer at Skadden Arps, a big firm that was in Chicago, and then in around 2005 I moved back to the Detroit area, which is where I grew up, to join Foley and Lardner, another large firm. After a couple years, right in the midst of the financial crisis — and in Detroit the automotive crisis — one of my best friends and I split off from the big firm and started our own. So I did that for a number of years, before leaving the practice of law and joining my wife, who had already established a marketing agency. 

I didn’t really think about thought leadership as a big aspect of our marketing agency, which was starting to focus on just serving the legal industry at the time, until we moved about 250 miles north to northern Michigan, more than 250 miles away from any of my clients and target clients. So thought leadership marketing became a much bigger aspect of building our agency and acquiring clients. I started blogging, I wrote my first book, and around 2017 I became a practitioner and found that selling expertise really worked. I could consult and execute on behalf of lawyers with the skill set that I’ve developed for myself. 

There was no client base for us in Traverse City, unlike Detroit, where there was plenty of business nearby. So I went from developing relationships, attending events, that kind of stuff that I had to do in person, to more of a marketing mindset: I’m going to put my ideas out there and sell on that basis. This new mindset unlocked the country as a target market, and today Michigan is a relatively minuscule portion of our overall client base, which is all over the country, and in some cases, all over the world. 

Bob: Do the same principles of legal marketing apply, whether they’re here or in Europe or Asia Pacific?

Jay: Yes. I should say some of the international work is focused a little bit more on training and coaching, which is a little different from thought leadership execution. But one thing tends to lead to another, and there’s something that gets our foot in the door. 

Building a Tool Kit for Lawyers

Bob: So tell us a little bit about the training work. What’s that about? How does it fit with thought leadership? 

Jay: Most of the training is devoted to business development and marketing, and it’s really geared towards individual lawyers who are looking to build their own legal practice. We focus on tools in their toolkit. One tool is business development, which I define as one-to-one relationship building. This could be having lunch with a prospective client, making a phone call, attending an event with someone, that kind of thing. 

Another tool is marketing. It’s different from business development because it emphasizes reaching many people. It scales in a way that business development cannot, and it allows you to really focus your business development on your most important relationships. For lawyers or any profession selling sophisticated professional services, my advice is always to identify 20 to 30 of your most important high potential relationships, then focus your business development, your one-to-one relationship-building time, on those contacts. Use something like thought leadership marketing as a nice compliment to that. This helps you reach your broader network and your broader contact base and bring new people into the fold, allowing them to discover your ideas and sort of opt into your ecosystem. 

Bob: This is like what happens in the consulting industry: Business development becomes a lot easier for lawyers if they’re recognized, if they’ve done some thought leadership writing and people loved their article or their white paper.

Jay: It doesn’t work quite that way. When you’re talking about high stakes, high complexity work, thought leadership is typically a reinforcement mechanism for someone who has been referred to a client or is otherwise known for their reputation, sometimes through their thought leadership as well. It could be a conversation starter that starts a relationship, gets you on someone’s radar screen, and then it’s your job to nurture that relationship and build trust over time, in part through continued thought leadership that you’re serving to that individual. 

I tell my clients, don’t think of your thought leadership marketing the same way you would think about of a general marketing asset. Create it for with one person in mind and literally use it as a way to add a value-added touch point to that relationship. Write something for one person and email it to that person, rather than blasting it out as a client alert. Don’t just count on someone bumping into it on LinkedIn — Use it as a business development asset, a touch point for one person. Naturally, it’s going to apply and be relevant to others as well. 

Bob: What has been the evolution of your firm? Or did you start with the solo lawyers and then work up to mid-sized practices, and then big law? Or did you start with big law and then find a sweet spot somewhere else?

Jay: We started working with some very large firms, some of the biggest in the world. And we’ve always had some smaller clients as well. With some clients we’re on retainer; we’re sort of their outside arm, and we’re handling the email newsletters and some design work as needed. There are other big clients, where we will work on something like strategy for a particular practice group as it relates to their thought leadership marketing. Instead of being implementers and executors of a strategy, such as doing white papers, we’ve evolved to offering more of the strategic thinking that comes before the implementation. 

Bob: So it seems like you and your firm are in a very good place. 

Jay: We have a nice mix of strategy, plus training, plus one-to-one coaching that I do with specific lawyers. It’s not just one tiny specialty that could go out of style. For example, I’d be concerned if I had an SEO agency. To be that narrowly focused on one area of expertise would give me some sleepless nights. 

Generative AI and the Legal Profession 

Bob: Generative AI is already doing a lot of writing, no matter how you or how I feel about it.  

Jay: I think attorneys should be using it more. It would be crazy not to. I tell my clients that this is a very valuable tool, but it’s almost as if I’m pushing them to do something they don’t want to do. I bet that  eight out of 10 lawyers, especially at the larger firms, are so scared based on the headlines of lawyers getting sanctioned because they used ChatGPT in their legal briefs, and it hallucinated and put in a fake case and now they’ve made headlines at Bloomberg Law. So, understandably, they’re hesitant to use some of these tools. But I always tell them that their marketing and business development could be a sandbox to help them learn to use AI effectively.  

Bob: I’ve used ChatGPT and seen the hallucinations, but I’ve also seen ChatGPT conduct amazing market research in minutes. It’s magic in many ways.  

Jay: it’s a polarizing topic, especially for those of us who write, but gosh it’s such a time saver. Most of us are not asking ChatGPT to write something and then publishing it. It’s an amazing tool to supplement time you would spend on Google trying to go down rabbit holes to verify information or just find it in the first place, or to come up with something like a historical analogy. ChatGPT is so good at these things, it’s crazy not to use it.  

Weathering Hard Times 

Bob: When you stand back and you look at what you’ve accomplished, did you have any doubts along the way — where you wondered if you made the right decision, or if you should go back to either your own law firm or to working with another medium or big firm?  

Jay: During COVID it was easy to wonder if everything would fall apart.  I used to be a corporate bankruptcy lawyer, and I figured that if things do fall apart I can always fall back on that. But I didn’t have any existential crises where it got to that point, despite the pains of growing an agency and serving clients in different domains, and sometimes losing a client. I guess karma, in a good way, works, and you get a new opportunity, and you keep going.  

Bob: I’ve had the same. During the recessions in 2008 and 2009 nobody was getting work and you had to be ready to scramble. And the antidote has always been to write more and publish more.

It’s also stressful when you split with a business partner, which I’ve done twice. Today I’m the sole owner of Buday, TLP, but I was a co-owner of Bloom Group before that. But these situations could be tumultuous.  

Jay: We’ve had a little of that as well. And, yeah, it is tumultuous, and it seems difficult to navigate, but you get through it and I guess it’s just the nature of being in business for yourself. My wife and I were just having a conversation this morning about how no client is forever for anyone who owns an agency or is in a professional services field. You know you’re going to churn over time. If you’re in it long enough, you know that you’ll replace the clients you lose, and hopefully you can keep growing. 

I’d rather have a portfolio of 20 clients where it hurts a little bit when you lose one. I’d rather take this risk profile, than just have just one job and all my eggs in one basket at this point in my life and career. Even being a partner in a big law firm is not risk free…they might downsize and you could lose your job. AI will continue impacting that industry, in particular at the junior level. Things are very rough in the associate hiring market right now among law firms.  

Elements of Success 

Bob: Lawyers and law firms are using thought leadership to grow to grow revenue and to keep revenue with current clients. Are there two or three keys to doing this effectively, when you look at your clients who have really taken off with your help? 

Jay: You need someone to take ownership and be a champion of this process. With my clients that have really done well with their thought leadership approach, it’s often the practice group leader, or it could be someone else at the partner level, within one of those groups, who’s the champion.  It’s the type of person who would call on the firm to professionalize its approach: We need a strategy, we need systems, we need processes, we need accountability. We need someone to come in and tell us what we’re doing wrong, that kind of thing. So that’s an example of that ownership mindset that someone might take. 

The successful firms also have a real feedback loop established with their clients, like asking them, “What are two to three things that you don’t know and wish you knew?” And then we’re going to write about those issues, have these conversations and understand what clients want. The typical approach for lawyers is to say, “The Ninth Circuit just issued a new opinion. Let’s write about it.” But, does that reflect anything that a client needs to know right now or doesn’t know? Clients consciously or subconsciously expect their lawyers to tell them something they don’t know, to be their trusted advisor. This means providing clients with the value of the lawyer’s unique vantage point, and do it in a way that is actionable for the clients and improves their decision making.  

Distribution is as important as the quality of the writing and the insights and the piece itself. Because if no one’s seeing this thing, then what does it matter? Let’s say a law firm is focused on the renewable energy industry. What is the ecosystem of attention for that audience that you’re trying to target? We need to immerse ourselves and our ideas in that ecosystem…where we’re publishing and speaking, the events we attend. This shows we understand where people are focusing their time and attention. 

One of the biggest mistakes law firms make is when a lawyer writes an article and sends it to the marketing department, which posts it on the website, and then that’s it. They’re hoping that it gets discovered but we know that’s a pretty tall order. If that’s your approach, you’d better lower your expectations. This goes back to my earlier point about using thought leadership marketing as a business development asset. The better approach is to write something, identify their 10 highest potential contacts, and send an individual email to that person with a note that could say, “Hey, this is something we think you should know about. It’s important, and if you’d like, we’d be happy to jump on a phone call with you for 20 minutes to discuss it and answer any questions you might have.”  

Thought Leadership Evolution in Law  

Bob: Looking at the state of thought leadership marketing at law firms today, versus say, when you started, how has it changed?  

Jay: I think there’s been a broad recognition that it is very important, and that more lawyers should be doing it. We’re certainly seeing the form of thought leadership changing, with more podcasts and more types of writing: longer form, shorter form, social media content, etc. 

I’m not seeing that integration of the marketing and business development to the degree that it should be done. And I’m not seeing firms do enough on the distribution side of things, just defaulting back to the website, but I think there are probably more lawyers writing than there used to be. Marketing departments are slicing and dicing, pushing lawyers to do thought leadership content in different forms, and use different avenues and platforms to share it. The growth and evolution of the specific platforms that give distribution to legal content — like JD Supra or the National Law Review – have helped because firms are spending lots of money on these distribution channels. So internally, they’re pushing more people to create content. I’m not sure if that’s moving the needle as much as it could be for many firms, but I think firms are recognizing that they need a more visible presence online to showcase their thought leadership.  

Research from Gartner talks about sort of the buyer’s journey, and how you get so little time and maybe no time with the prospective client because they’re doing all this due diligence beforehand and winnowing down their options. I think that hits home with many lawyers and law firms because they are realizing they need to have more of a robust digital presence, and that’s led to more thought leadership.  

Taking Publishing to the Next Level 

Bob: Are we seeing the McKinsey Quarterly or McKinsey publishing equivalents in the legal industry, especially at the big law firms, where there’s a quarterly publication, or every six month publication, and if you click on an article written two years ago it’s still somewhat current?  

Jay: You will see more firms, especially the bigger ones, writing about trends in securities litigation or capital markets or this or that. The problem is that this is typically just a collection of individual blog posts, without any editing, without any through line, without any real analysis and no original research. This is one of the legal industry’s biggest missed opportunities: It hasn’t caught up to PwC, the McKinseys and Bain and Company with original research surveys, deep analysis and the kinds of things that the media is going to cite year after year. The legal industry’s quarterly and biannual reports are more likely to be seven related blog posts on employment law that are just put in one package. 

Bob: I’ve seen that kind of legal best practice research in only one place. The US Chamber of Commerce set up this institute for legal reform, geared to trade associations whose members were affected by class action lawsuits, and it was way ahead of its time. Their focus was to do best practice research to understand what the big corporations that were most successful in defending against class action lawsuits did differently from the big firms who lost. The Chamber didn’t attempt to recommend a law firm; they wanted to understand legal practices and business practices.  

Jay: There’s a unique aspect to the practice of law in the legal industry, which is distinct from other areas of professional services. Everything you do can be nitpicked to death by opposing counsel, which wants nothing more than to uncover the mistakes you made while rushing to meet the court-imposed deadline — which, if you had missed, would expose you to malpractice risk and a lawsuit.  It’s a uniquely challenging and stressful job because the practice is so adversarial. Put yourself in the shoes of a litigator who is juggling 10 different things; and all of these issues, risks, and conflicts with opposing counsel. You can’t tell somebody like this to step away and spend five hours writing an article or lead the initiative to do an original research survey. These things help you understand why there are missed opportunities. 

Bob: So imagine yourself as the chief marketing officer of a billion-dollar law firm, and you’re given a budget of 2% of revenue, or $20 million. What are you going to do with that $20 million? What kind of people are you going to have in your marketing and thought leadership departments?  

Jay: I would go out and hire journalists. There’s no reason why a law firm, with its incredibly insightful and smart people and subject matter experts, can’t become a publishing company that dominates the information flow for that niche industry, or at least is one of the dominant forces in that area. How do we become much more of a media company, as a means of marketing our services?  

Bob: I’ve read that Andreessen Horowitz has positioned itself as a media company in the VC industry.  

Jay: That would be certainly one part of the model. I would probably use some of that budget to put a few of my ambitious and super smart partner-level lawyers on sabbatical to write the definitive books on various subject matters and industries they focus on. Very few lawyers do this because of the time crunch and stress and other challenges associated with the practice of law. I would invest heavily in training more people on how to do this effectively. This is one of those areas where you have to both lead the horse to water and really help them to figure out how to drink. 

The whole idea is not only to become a publishing company, or to have the definitive conference and the amazing podcast, or to report and curate the news. You also need to be the Insight leader in the space.  

Bob: Do you know of any big law firms that, in fact, have that kind of budget, and people who are doing these things? 

Jay:  No. There are now law firms topping $4-5 billion a year and $10 million per year in profits per partner. The money’s there, but none of them are doing this. Lawyers are expected to write the content that gets published by the marketing team. Oftentimes they’ll have some PR people or agency on retainer there. They might try to find a publishing home for that content elsewhere. It’s the same system that’s been going on for the last two decades.   

Bob:  What would say to the managing partner of such a big law firm when he or she says, “that sounds great, Jay, but what’s the return? What do we get?” 

Jay: Well, when your prospective clients need information, don’t you want them coming to you for that information? And wouldn’t that be an opportunity to be known as the definitive source of what’s happening in a certain industry world — to be that source, or email newsletter, conference, or podcast? 

One of my favorite stories and people in the legal industry is Scott Becker, who is still a partner at McGuireWoods healthcare law. About 25-30 years ago Scott was an associate trying to carve out a space for himself. And he decided that he needed a niche. He saw an opportunity in ambulatory surgery centers…those independent surgery centers, not on site with the hospital. He started just writing a print newsletter for them and mailing it out to these clients. This turned into Becker’s healthcare, which is probably the the preeminent media empire in the healthcare space. Scott is still practicing law, and he’s got this publishing arm that’s turned into something incredible, and gosh, that’s increased his and his group’s authority, reputation, and business as a result.  

Future Directions 

Bob: Do you foresee the same thing I see in the evolution of this thought leadership market, where what you’ve done happens with a lot of niches? There’s nobody who specializes in thought leadership in the automotive sector for some reason, or thought leadership in the accounting sector or staffing industry. 

Jay: I think there’s something to having the solution for a certain industry. This will always be a valuable model for the right client. You will need to be able to talk with clients about how this fits specifically into their revenue generation model. Where is the ROI? How does this work in the life cycle of developing clients?  

When I started my own firm, I sort of picked a niche of clients I wanted to go after as a lawyer, and I wrote for them and spoke at their conferences, and I was doing thought leadership marketing. Today you’ve also got to understand how that can translate into revenue. That means speaking the language of that client and having enough experience to spot the patterns and recognize the roadblocks. I just think that it’s going to increasingly hard to be a generalist, especially 10 to 20 years down the road.  

Bob: What would you tell people who are kind of new to this profession, who are thinking of entering this profession – They may be journalists, consultants or lawyers – about the opportunities to do thought leadership marketing for a specific industry? 

Jay: If you are just one person and you’re looking to do it independently, there’s all kinds of opportunities. I mean, almost every market is big enough to support your ambitions, no matter how small it might seem. I would tell them to go very, very narrow. If you want to be a thought leadership consultant or writer for the legal industry, for example, I’d tell them to focus on one very narrow practice group. And if you can make contact with the right person in that group and tell them, “I only do this for you,” that’s going to resonate a lot with someone who otherwise would just be choosing among a bunch of undifferentiated options.  

Bob: For example, you might go into a big law firm with a media practice, and offer to help them produce thought leadership on the legal issues involving the streaming media industry.  

Jay: Exactly. Pick the niche, and then have a process. I need to sit down for 30 minutes or 15 minutes with the subject matter expert. Capture their voice, capture their insights, and then turn around a polished draft that’ll get you 90% of the way there for your lawyer to edit. Clients will be very happy with that kind of thing. But if you try to do that for every subject matter expert, you’re going to lose credibility. It’s far better to have one or a small number of areas of expertise that you can do that for; you’ll be credible, and I think you’ll have success.  

Bob: Jay, where do you see Harrington Communications going over the next five years?  

Jay: I would say that the biggest thing is probably continuing to move away from implementation to strategy and training. You know how it is — Sometimes you have these revenue streams that are hard to hard to give up but they eat up a lot of your time and effort and oversight. Shifting requires the psychological wherewithal and strength to say no to more things, to sharpen your positioning and how you describe what you do for the marketplace, and limit the kind of engagements you take on. I turn 50 in September, so I want to focus more on the strategic and training realms, and move away from implementation execution.  

I’ve written four books. I have a fifth on the way. I write a weekly email newsletter. I write a lot of long form content, LinkedIn content, lots of podcast episodes. I need a sabbatical so I have time to take all these ideas and consolidate them down into a real clear intellectual property framework — one big idea that encapsulates everything I’ve worked on.  Like the Matt Dixon challenger sale, or the Seth Godin Purple Cow. 

Bob: Well, Jay, thank you so much for your time. I wish you great success. I think you’re going to go even further over the next five years, and I’m anxious to see where you are in 10 years, to see the evolution of your business.  

Jay: Thanks, Bob. This has been a real pleasure, and I admire you and appreciate your mentorship and friendship.